Simmons: What's happened to baseball, the sport I used to love?

The game I grew up loving has disappeared behind so much physics and geometry — two subjects I never did well in — somehow replacing the romance and suspense I adored about Major League Baseball.

It’s hard to completely understand how I came to love baseball so much, knowing what we know and see now, before there was ever a team in Toronto, when baseball was something I watched on a small black-and-white screen on a Saturday afternoon, eagerly awaiting the Game of the Week. Baseball was something I read about almost daily in magazines and newspapers, and devoured every time The Sporting News landed in the mail.

My father was something of a baseball freak. Before I learned to read, I knew that Ted Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived. My dad seemed to know that, even though he never saw Williams play. He just knew, and it seemed important for him to tell me that.

Years later, he told me about coming home from work, carrying his briefcase into his office, and doing what my mother thought was invoicing. What he was actually doing was scoring baseball games and listening to them on the radio. And when there weren’t any games to score, he invented his own card game, his personal version of Strat-o-matic, before there was ever card games or video games or anything to play that wasn’t real baseball.

I liked nothing better than to sit with him at Maple Leafs baseball games at the foot of Bathurst St. I carried a glove, he carried a scorebook. We watched triple-A together when the stands were almost empty and the interest in the city almost non-existent. I was nine, he was 47. We could argue which of the Leafs in 1966, Reggie Smith or Tony Horton, would be the better major-leaguer.

The next year, 1967, was the last year of triple-A baseball in Toronto. The Maple Leafs were the farm team of the Boston Red Sox, who came from nowhere to win the pennant that year, managed by the ex-Leafs manager Dick Williams. “The impossible dream,” they called it. Everything about baseball seemed to be just that in my youth.

I didn’t see much of baseball as I inherited my father’s obsession: There were no Blue Jays or Expos then. There was no nightly television sports highlights show or even much on the news about the game. There were no sports networks or sports-radio stations back then. But you had your imagination and your boxscores and you didn’t need anything else.

Then the World Series came on television and you saw Bob Gibson for the first time. My dad called him the greatest pitcher ever. After the 1967 World Series and before he had a 1.12 earned-run average in 1968, I called him that, too. I still call him that.

He started nine World Series games for the St. Louis Cardinals in his career. He pitched nine complete games, seven for wins. How could anybody be better than that?

Would Cardinals great Bob Gibson be allowed to be as great if he was pitching today? SUN FILE

The more baseball I got to see, the more time I spent listening to my dad, the more I became enamoured with defence. He told me about Willie Mays’ catch in the 1954 World Series and about a catch that somebody named Al Gionfriddo made off Joe DiMaggio in 1947. I never really knew anything about Gionfriddo except he made that catch. Every time I saw a great catch — like the one Devon White made for the Blue Jays in the 1992 World Series — I compared it to the ones made by Mays and Gionfriddo, and still complain about how we were cheated of a triple play that Blue Jays championship season.

I think a lot about defence now in baseball because the constant shifting and technology has robbed us of thrills that don’t exist anymore. The best left side of an infield I ever saw — and my dad agreed with me — had Brooks Robinson at third base for the Baltimore Orioles and Mark Belanger at shortstop. Belanger didn’t make errors and Robinson regularly took your breath away.

But the need to dive to your left and go deep in the hole — to make the kind of play behind second base Roberto Alomar would make rather easily, even though it was nearly impossible — is gone. Today, they position the second basemen in the outfield. They don’t have to move very far to catch just about anything. They position themselves where they are told to position themselves. The human element is another thing gone in big-league baseball.

I wonder what we would think of Alomar playing today’s game, because the plays he made — to his left, to his right, the catches, the throws — were instinctual and poetic. A graph and chart can’t replace beauty and instinct. Where do we see that now?

We can’t see a Gibson today because of pitch counts and innings limits and the babying of pitchers that have become part of the business. There are no Gibsons anymore because the game won’t allow it and sports science and agents and management have made it all but certain that Superman pitchers can’t ever be Supermen again.

Baseball was more fun when it was more human. I used to watch Frank White play second base for the Kansas City Royals and didn’t think it was possible for anyone to play second base better than he did. And then along came Alomar and, from a local point of view, I never saw a better everyday player up close.

My dad would talk about Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle or maybe Joe DiMaggio being players you couldn’t forget. They were mostly mythical figures for me. I saw a little bit of Mays at the end when he was too old and too slow to be special. But what a giant he was, a bigger star than anyone playing today while we try to figure out why baseball can’t find a way to market Mike Trout.

Everything changed for me when the Montreal Expos were born in 1969 and baseball came to Canada in a more regular way than ever before.

We could tune in twice a week on television. There were some local radio broadcasts. It wasn’t anything like today, where there are 15 games on just about every night and every highlight of every game blends into one other. Devouring boxscores was what I did long before anyone knew what fantasy baseball was — it used to be the only way we knew who was who and what was what.

Jays second baseman Roberto Alomar goes airborne as Phillies’ Darren Daulton slides into second during the 1993 World Series. GETTY IMAGES FILE

As I got older, I came to be fascinated by the great outfield arms of baseball. Ellis Valentine sure could throw and so could Jesse Barfield and Dave Winfield and Dave Parker and Dwight Evans and Roberto Clemente.

My dad would talk about the arms of Mantle and Al Kaline. And he never got a chance to see Ichiro throw. But man, he could throw it, too.

How is it I know those names without looking anything up and can barely name the best arm in baseball today?

Because there aren’t really many plays at the plate anymore. It’s easy to understand why, with safety being pre-eminent in all of sports today. But how often does someone go deep to the fence in right field, pick up a ball the way Valentine or Barfield would, and fire a bullet to home plate or third base?

I don’t know what it says about baseball today that I can name seven or eight great arms from the ’70s and ’80s and barely mention one player from today. Tom Brady is like no one who came before him in football. Connor McDavid is faster with the puck than any hockey player we’ve ever seen. LeBron James is well, LeBron James.

Baseball has evolved, just not in the right way. There are fewer base-runners, fewer balls in play, more strikeouts, more home runs, less managing than ever before.

Wins aren’t important for a starting pitcher the way they were for Bob Gibson and RBI don’t matter the way they once did for Tony Perez and the Big Red Machine. Just about anybody who plays regularly today can hit 20 home runs if he has the proper launch angle with his swing.

Nuance has been defeated, pushed aside by analytics and general managers who think computers can select talent better than scouts can. Stealing bases is a thing of the past, Rickey Henderson’s career be damned.

All of this happening, or not happening, at a time — maybe a record-setting time — for young players in baseball. There is a remarkable pool of kids playing baseball today in the majors. Ronald Acuna Jr. in Atlanta heads up the sensational 21-and-under club, alongside Juan Soto in Washington, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette in Toronto, and Fernando Tatis Jr. in San Diego. All of them are learning on the job, the way Mays did at 20, DiMaggio at 21, Mantle breaking in as a teenager in New York.

The talent in today’s game is more than generational. It’s matching some of the greatest names of all time. This should be reason to celebrate the richest, deepest period of baseball youth, maybe ever.

All of this genius youth is being strangled by a game that has allowed the computers to take over, the heartbeats pushed aside for clicks. In a 10-year-period from 2009 to 2018, the number of balls in play dropped by 10,000 a season. Ten thousand? That’s more than four balls in play per game, on average, gone missing.

The current Blue Jays strike out 9.11 times per game. A decade ago, they struck out 6.35 times a game. When they won the World Series in 1993, they struck out 5.3 times a game.

That’s an increase of 71% over a 26-year period in baseball.

The more strikeouts there are, the fewer balls there are in play; the fewer base runners there are, the fewer defensive plays made. The more teams play the shift, the less, frankly, there is to watch.

My father has been gone for 20 years. So much of baseball has changed since he passed. I still watch a ton of baseball, more than ever before, really, because it’s so accessible. It’s in my house, on my television, every night. But the more I watch, the less the game interests me. Sadly, for me, the romance, the magic, is gone.

And I’m glad my dad, baseball lover of all baseball lovers, never saw this game. It might have broken his heart.

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